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Authors: Raymond Ibrahim
Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (36 page)
BOOK: Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians
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For an example of how American academics see Islam and its history through rose-colored glasses, consider the way the medieval Islamic leader Saladin has been so thoroughly whitewashed and held up as a counterexample to help demonize Christians. According to one esteemed American historian, “When we contrast with this [the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem] the conduct of Saladin when he captured Jerusalem from the Christians in 1187, we have a striking illustration of the difference between the two civilizations and realize what the Christians might learn from contact with the Saracens [Muslims] in the Holy Land.” Note the present tense: “might learn.” Saladin—a hero for al-Qaeda
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—is being held up in the West as an example from whom “intolerant” Christians today need to learn. Another historian wrote that Saladin was “unusually merciful for his time. He allowed the Crusaders who entered it [Jerusalem] in a bloodbath, to leave the city in peace.”
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—is being held up in the West as an example from whom “intolerant” Christians today need to learn. Another historian wrote that Saladin was “unusually merciful for his time. He allowed the Crusaders who entered it [Jerusalem] in a bloodbath, to leave the city in peace.”
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Such historians habitually neglect to mention the political exigencies of the situation, which prompted Saladin’s apparent mercy—just as they fail to mention that in the Muslim lands where he was in absolute power, Saladin’s “mercy” expressed itself in commands to break the crosses from atop the domes of churches, to cover church buildings with black mud, and to crucify Christians.
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Saladin’s retirement wish—to pursue the same Crusaders he supposedly pardoned “until there shall not remain on the face of this earth one unbeliever in God [Allah], or I will die in the attempt”—is also conveniently omitted from the story, as it detracts from the narrative of the magnanimous Muslim.
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Saladin’s retirement wish—to pursue the same Crusaders he supposedly pardoned “until there shall not remain on the face of this earth one unbeliever in God [Allah], or I will die in the attempt”—is also conveniently omitted from the story, as it detracts from the narrative of the magnanimous Muslim.
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This kind of revisionist history—painting Christianity and Western civilization as inherently violent, playing up those rare incidents in which Muslim rulers can be made to appear tolerant and merciful, and omitting to mention the vastly more numerous cases in which they were intolerant and cruel—has obvious political ramifications: the modern-day West must appease and make concessions to the Islamic world to atone for its own sins, and not repeat the mistakes of the Crusaders by again being critical or mistrusting of Muslims, from whom the West can learn tolerance. This is the attitude toward Islam among the West’s elite—from the highest echelons of academia on down. Those who get scholarships, grants, and positions (many of them funded by Saudi petro dollars)—in other words, those on their way to a future in the academic world—employ intellectual acrobatics to portray the Islamic world as tolerant, victimized, wonderful to its religious minorities, and so forth. Having been both a graduate student at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and an employee at the African and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress, I have had direct personal experience of the bias that skews the academic study of Islam in the West.
THE MEDIA: OBSCURING THE PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANSThe whitewashing of Islam that began in academia naturally metastasized to the media and Hollywood. One can list any number of supposedly “historical” movies—
Kingdom of Heaven
is one recent example—that contrast noble and magnanimous Muslims with intolerant, fanatical, and greedy Christians. Such movies accurately portray only the Western self-loathing that became popular in the 1970s—the same self-loathing that helped drive Muslims back to the Islamic way. These movies turn history on its head.
Agora
, for example, a movie set in pre-Islamic fourth-century Egypt, at the time when Christianity was becoming the dominant religion, portrays pagans as tolerant and open-minded, and Christians as indoctrinated and intolerant brutes who have long beards, dress in black, and roam the streets terrorizing and murdering anyone who disagrees with them. The “Christians” in the movie are in fact a perfect depiction of Egypt’s modern-day Salafi Muslims, who wear long beards, dress in white tunics, and roam in bands, terrorizing those who disagree with them—Christian Copts at the top of the list. In other words, at a time when Egypt’s Christians are being persecuted, Hollywood’s response is to produce a movie portraying Egyptian Christians as the persecutors.
Kingdom of Heaven
is one recent example—that contrast noble and magnanimous Muslims with intolerant, fanatical, and greedy Christians. Such movies accurately portray only the Western self-loathing that became popular in the 1970s—the same self-loathing that helped drive Muslims back to the Islamic way. These movies turn history on its head.
Agora
, for example, a movie set in pre-Islamic fourth-century Egypt, at the time when Christianity was becoming the dominant religion, portrays pagans as tolerant and open-minded, and Christians as indoctrinated and intolerant brutes who have long beards, dress in black, and roam the streets terrorizing and murdering anyone who disagrees with them. The “Christians” in the movie are in fact a perfect depiction of Egypt’s modern-day Salafi Muslims, who wear long beards, dress in white tunics, and roam in bands, terrorizing those who disagree with them—Christian Copts at the top of the list. In other words, at a time when Egypt’s Christians are being persecuted, Hollywood’s response is to produce a movie portraying Egyptian Christians as the persecutors.
The newsrooms of the mainstream media are sometimes little better than Hollywood. Most of the reporting being done on persecuted Christians is not from the larger media outlets, but rather from dedicated journalists—including volunteers—and smaller media agencies who understand the situation and who care more about reporting the facts than about being politically correct. To some extent it is natural that smaller media specialize in covering Christian persecution. The major newspapers, wire services, and TV networks cannot be expected to focus exclusively on this one phenomenon, but rather must take all world events into consideration, highlighting the ones that seem the most important (and get the most attention, and sell the most advertising). But even given these constraints, by and large mainstream-media journalists have been woefully negligent in their reporting.
Otherwise it would be impossible for me to break stories in the Western press, as I often do, simply by translating from Arabic-language media sources the sorts of stories that the mainstream media ignore. I have already mentioned the story about Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti’s assertion that it is “necessary to destroy all the churches” in the Arabian Peninsula. His claim was reported in the Arabic media where Western reporters habitually pick up their stories. But they did not seem interested in reporting on this one. As I pointed out at the time that I broke the story in the English-language press, “I have not seen this story, already some three days old, translated on any English news source, though ‘newsworthy’ stories are often translated in mere hours.”
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Many media outlets, including Fox News, subsequently picked up my translation. When the story did break into the mainstream, many wondered at the delay, asking how such a big story could have been ignored. As Clifford D. May, writing on National Review Online, put it,
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Many media outlets, including Fox News, subsequently picked up my translation. When the story did break into the mainstream, many wondered at the delay, asking how such a big story could have been ignored. As Clifford D. May, writing on National Review Online, put it,
Imagine if Pat Robertson called for the demolition of all the mosques in America. It would be front-page news. It would be on every network and cable-news program. There would be a demand for Christians to denounce him, and denounce him they would—in the harshest terms. The president of the United States and other world leaders would weigh in, too. Rightly so.So why is it that when Abdulaziz ibn Abdullah Al al-Sheikh, the grand mufti of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, declares that it is “necessary to destroy all the churches in the Arabian Peninsula,” the major media do not see this as even worth reporting? . . .This should be emphasized: Al al-Sheikh is not the Arabian equivalent of some backwoods Florida pastor. He is the highest religious authority in Saudi Arabia....None of this might have come to light at all had it not been for Raymond Ibrahim, the Shillman fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an associate fellow at the Middle East Forum. He was the first to call attention to the grand mufti’s remarks, based on reports from three Arabic-language websites. . . .
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Other times, not only do the mainstream media fail to report on major stories that otherwise put Islam in a negative light, they even attempt to suppress those stories. For instance, when I exposed how growing numbers of clerics were calling for the “demolition of Egypt’s Great Pyramids,”
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in light of the election of Muslim Brotherhood leader Muhammad Morsi to the presidency of Egypt, the
New York Times
and the
Huffington Post
responded by portraying my report as a hoax. In fact I had translated from legitimate Arabic-language sources, and the mainstream outlets never offered any meaningful rebutting evidence. They just held the story up to ridicule.
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And while it may be difficult to believe in the destruction of the pyramids, the fact is, at the time of this writing, other less massive ancient Egyptian artifacts are quietly being targeted and destroyed by Salafis seeking to purge Egypt of idolatry—in accordance with Islam’s teachings and the prophet’s actions.
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in light of the election of Muslim Brotherhood leader Muhammad Morsi to the presidency of Egypt, the
New York Times
and the
Huffington Post
responded by portraying my report as a hoax. In fact I had translated from legitimate Arabic-language sources, and the mainstream outlets never offered any meaningful rebutting evidence. They just held the story up to ridicule.
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And while it may be difficult to believe in the destruction of the pyramids, the fact is, at the time of this writing, other less massive ancient Egyptian artifacts are quietly being targeted and destroyed by Salafis seeking to purge Egypt of idolatry—in accordance with Islam’s teachings and the prophet’s actions.
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The possible destruction of antiquities is not the only—or even the most important—story that the Western mainstream media miss, distort, or get completely wrong. Consider the recent and ongoing wars in Sudan and Lebanon. In both cases, Muslim supremacists were—and are—trying to convert, subjugate, or wipe out Christians. (It is not for nothing that Samuel Huntington observed in his
Clash of Civilizations
that “Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards.”)
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Though religion is the primary cause of both conflicts, reports in the mainstream media focus on more peripheral factors, especially on economic ones, to explain the violence.
Clash of Civilizations
that “Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards.”)
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Though religion is the primary cause of both conflicts, reports in the mainstream media focus on more peripheral factors, especially on economic ones, to explain the violence.
Worst of all, however, is when the media in the West not only obscures the suffering of Christians under Islam, but also even demonizes these victims of Muslim persecution. For example, Robert Fisk, the well-known Middle East correspondent for the U.K.’s widely read
Independent
, recently demonstrated why Islamic jihadis, including the late Osama bin Laden, have recommended his writings to Western readers.
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Independent
, recently demonstrated why Islamic jihadis, including the late Osama bin Laden, have recommended his writings to Western readers.
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In a June 4, 2012, article discussing the turmoil in Egypt and Syria, Fisk actually blamed the abused Christian minorities of those two countries for supporting those secularist leaders most likely to protect their lives. For instance he scoffed at how Egyptian presidential candidate “Ahmed Shafiq, the Mubarak loyalist, has the support of the Christian Copts, and [Syrian President] Assad has the support of the Syrian Christians. The Christians support the dictators. Not much of a line, is it?”
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In Fisk’s naïve way of thinking, Sharia-pushing Muslims are patriotic freedom-lovers, and the local Christians are unpatriotic freedom-haters for refusing to support their movement. Truly, “not much of a line, is it?” Completely missing from Fisk’s narrative is why Christians in Egypt supported Shafiq, and why Christians in Syria would rather see the secularist Assad remain in power: because the alternatives—jihad-supporting Islamists seeking to enforce Sharia law—have been making their lives a living hell.
Fisk’s biased narrative was not, of course, original to him. It originates with the Islamists themselves, who, bemoaning the secularist Shafiq’s good showing in the presidential election, laid the blame on Egypt’s Christian Copts for coming out in large numbers to vote for him. Tarek al-Zomor, a prominent figure of the Islamic Group al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya—the terrorist organization that slaughtered fifty-eight European tourists, including several of Fisk’s countrymen, during the 1997 Luxor Massacre—“demanded an apology from the Copts” for voting for Shafiq, which he called a “fatal error.”
The uncritical Fisk followed suit, portraying the Middle East’s Christians as traitors. Yet back in the real world, it was obvious why Egyptian Copts did not vote for the candidate from the Muslim Brotherhood. As one Coptic activist put it: “Did they [complaining Islamists] really expect a Christian to choose a president to represent him from those who cut off the ear of a Christian, blocked the railways in objection to the appointment of a Christian governor in Qena, burn down several churches and who are diligently working to write a Constitution which undermines the rights of Christians?”
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Even secular Muslim writer Khaled Montasser, in an article titled “The Muslim Brotherhood Asks Why Christians Fear Them?!,” pointed out that the Brotherhood’s own official documents and fatwas decree anti-Christian measures, including the destruction of churches and the prevention of burying Christian “infidels” near Muslim graves. Little wonder that Christians did not vote for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Muhammad Morsi, but rather for the secular Shafiq—they naturally did not support a platform that called for their own persecution.
In Syria, as we have seen, Islamist-led opposition forces have been terrorizing, murdering, and plundering the nation’s Christian minority and promising to enforce full Sharia if and when they overthrow Assad. Is it surprising that many Syrian Christians hope to see Assad prevail?
The
Independent’
sMiddle East foreign correspondent has apparently missed all these “subtleties.” Instead Fisk bemoaned how those in Washington who support secular rulers “will want to pump up Christian fears and frighten the West with the awfulness of ‘Muslim fundamentalism.’”
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Independent’
sMiddle East foreign correspondent has apparently missed all these “subtleties.” Instead Fisk bemoaned how those in Washington who support secular rulers “will want to pump up Christian fears and frighten the West with the awfulness of ‘Muslim fundamentalism.’”
14
Yet even the mainstream media, ordinarily pretty blasé about “the awfulness of ‘Muslim fundamentalism,’” does report on the very worst anecdotes of Christian persecution under Islam. Those stories, such as the October 2010 Baghdad church massacre, which saw some fifty-eight Christians killed, are simply too spectacular to ignore. All too often, however, while they report the bare-bones facts of the actual persecution, they distort the context in which it occurs, sustaining an aura of moral relativism that minimizes the role of Muslims—and certainly the role of Islam—in causing the violence. Unprovoked Muslim attacks on Christians are portrayed as “sectarian strife,” a phrase that conjures the image of two equally matched adversaries—equally abused, and equally abusive. This hardly describes reality: Christian minorities being persecuted in Muslim-majority nations.
The headlines alone say it all. For example, the New Year’s Eve Coptic church attack that left some twenty-eight dead did receive prominent coverage, but under odd headlines: “Clashes Grow as Egyptians Remain Angry after an Attack,” was the
New York Times
headline, while “Christians clash with police in Egypt after attack on churchgoers kills 21” was the
Washington Post
’s—as if frustrated and harried Christians lashing out against their persecutors is the big news, not the persecution itself; as if their angry reaction to an unprovoked attack somehow evens everything up.
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New York Times
headline, while “Christians clash with police in Egypt after attack on churchgoers kills 21” was the
Washington Post
’s—as if frustrated and harried Christians lashing out against their persecutors is the big news, not the persecution itself; as if their angry reaction to an unprovoked attack somehow evens everything up.
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BOOK: Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians
5.75Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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